23

This is a major update to the GrapheneOS fork of the TalkBack screen reader for blind and low vision users. We migrated it to the latest upstream release of the TalkBack source code which was in a completely broken and unusable state. We fixed many major and minor issues with the code which has now passed testing by multiple blind and low vision users who depend on it. We also removed the dependency on Google Play.

The work to modernize our fork of TalkBack was started by a blind GrapheneOS user who has spent several years contributing to GrapheneOS and was completed by one of our newly hired app developers. It works well and is a huge improvement over the previous version despite the awful state of the upstream open source releases.

Our fork of TalkBack was previously only updated as part of our OS releases and this is the first time we're releasing a standalone update for it through our App Store. The 2026101600 release of GrapheneOS began signing TalkBack with a dedicated per-app key instead of a generic per-device-model OS signing key to enable out-of-band updates via our App Store.

Google's TalkBack is closed source software released as part of the closed source Android Accessibility Services suite. Several times per year on average, Google extracts the code for TalkBack from the overall source tree and releases it on GitHub in an increasingly broken state as a push of the extracted code without the commit history. They do the bare minimum to get it building and running with many major issues preventing it from being used. It isn't usable in the state they release it but they do provide the source code they use for it themselves and it's possible to fix it all up to work properly without the rest of the Android Accessibility Services code.

The upstream code uses 16.2 as the version despite that being a major release branch with many minor releases. We've kept that as the user-facing version since it's useful to compare it against the Android Accessibility Suite. However, it isn't a precise version for what it was based on and we haven't yet decided what to use as a combined version scheme to replace using a counter of GrapheneOS TalkBack releases which is now up to 23.